Medical treatment often requires the administration of a therapeutic agent to a particular part of a patient's body. Some maladies, however, are difficult to treat with currently available therapies and/or require administration of drugs to anatomical regions which are difficult to access. A patient's eye is a prime example of a difficult-to-reach anatomical region, and conventional approaches to treating many vision-threatening diseases, including retinitis pigmentosa, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma, have associated complications. For example, oral medications can have systemic side effects; topical applications may sting and engender poor patient compliance; injections generally require a medical visit, can be painful, and risk infection; and sustained-release implants must typically be removed after their supply is exhausted. Another example is the chemotherapeutic treatment of cancer, such as breast cancer or meningiomas, which often requires large doses of highly toxic chemotherapeutic agents, such as rapamycin, bevacizumab (e.g., AVASTIN), or irinotecan (CPT-11), to be administered to the patient intravenously, which may result in numerous undesired side effects outside the targeted area.
Implantable drug-delivery devices with refillable drug reservoirs address and overcome many of the problems associated with conventional drug-delivery modalities. They generally facilitate controlled delivery of pharmaceutical solutions to a specified target, and, as the contents of the drug reservoir deplete, allow a physician to refill the reservoir in situ, i.e., while leaving the device implanted within the patient's body. The administration and maintenance benefits that such pump devices afford, however, can also create new or increased hazards to the patient. Care must be taken to prevent the pump from being refilled with the wrong drug (e.g., a drug with the wrong active ingredient or a non-proprietary formulation), for example. Typically, the refill drug should match the previously administered drug. In addition, refilling the implanted drug pump device often entails a need to reprogram the device, e.g., to adjust a dosage protocol in response to a change in the patient's condition; this step may be overlooked or mishandled.
It would be desirable, therefore, to ensure that refill of implanted drug pump devices is accomplished in a manner that automatically verifies proper drug selection and that, further, ensures proper and convenient entry of program and/or information updates to the implanted devices during the course of the refill procedure.